I have to say that I have a natural revulsion toward "pure" theory - not just economic but more generally philosophical. I think that people who apriori assume that facts are irrelevant, only the contents of human mind is are either delusional, dishonest or both. The delusional aspect is linked to a certain psychological trait suggested by the research - the affective difficulty of coping with uncertainty and ambiguity, which is abundant in empirical reality. This affective dysfunction motivates these individuals to seek certitudes by artificial means. People of low or average intelligence do it be adopting "ready-made" rigid belief systems, such as conservative ideology or religion http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/jost.glaser.political-conservatism-as-motivated-social-cog.pdf.
People of above average intelligence, however, will not stoop to such primitive artifices. Instead, they will try to build an intellectual edifice that is impervious to facts and unavoidable uncertainty and ambiguity associated with them. Hence their propensity toward constructing "pure" theories based solely on mental artifices (the so-called "self-evident truths") and their logical consequences.
A classic case in point is Rene Descartes - a psychopath and animal torturer http://www.examiner.com/article/the-infamous-rene-descartes seeking to build a self-evident theory of everything based on certitudes. A connection between propensity toward highly abstract rigid thinking and social disconnect is also manifested in the autism spectrum, such Asperger syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome . An excellent cinematographic representation of this can be found in the film Pi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(film).
I find such highly abstract thinking devoid of empirical content rather sterile and unappealing - like a prison or a mental asylum cell. I could not get past page 50 of Ludvig von Mises "Human Action." I'd rather watch nature and listed to birds singing than waste my finite time in this world on such dry drivel. But that in itself is merely an aesthetic judgment, nothing more than a personal preference. What I find far more problematic is any attempt to apply such "pure" theories to real life problems. They invariably act as the Procrustean bed that stretches or chops real bodies to fit the theory (as Descartes and his followers literally did). However, their real usefulness for the powers that be is that they kill any doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity and discussion with artificial certitudes. As such, they are not a mere Procrustean bed that deforms any part of the body, but a guillotine or an ax in the hands of the censor that chops critically thinking heads off. That role of "pure" theory in economics was frequently exposed and criticized by Johns Kenneth Galbraith.
This gets me to a broader philosophical point. Humans have always generated more noise than most animals, but with modern technology their noise generation capacity exponentially grew to the point that noise drowns almost any useful signal. Therefore, focusing on the human generated noise - by which I mean most cultural and intellectual products - is a sure way of wasting finite life time on sifting through garbage and thus being led away from the truth. Filtering out this noise is therefore a prerequisite of any bona fide intellectual inquiry - a modern version of the medieval concept of docta ignorantia. Stay away from "learned scriptures" if you want to find the truth.
Wojtek
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 7:05 AM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
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> http://www.academia.edu/3291616/The_Strange_Case_of_Dr._Hayek_and_Mr._Hayek
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> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."